Scintilla is something I've been working on for a while at NPG. We opened it up earlier this week - if you want a full description, read the post on Nascent.
It's a bit like The Hype Machine, in that it aggregates content from sources focused around a particular topic (in this case science). It's a bit like Google Reader in that you can choose to subscribe to particular sources and see new items from those sources in your reading list (but it takes the approach Christian Montoya described today, in that there's no 'unread items' to keep up with). It's a bit like last.fm, in that it recommends items to you based on what other people liked (though it uses active ratings rather than passive). It's a bit like del.icio.us, in that you have a social network and can recommend items directly to people and groups. It's built on Drupal, with a few core hacks and some custom modules, as well as SimplePie, Solr for indexing, memcached and APC for speed. If you'd like to try it out, feel free to browse around or create an account (you can use your nature.com login if you already have one).
Comments
All fields are optional, email address will not be shown; no HTML, URLs are automatically hyperlinked.
Came up in my referrer logs over at WP, so I headed over and had a quick play. Looks great - thanks for adding FFS.
A thought ... in the personalization there could be a place to add my stared RSS feed from GReader (or related .. link blogs). This way, when I star an item it would be tracked as a vote even if I am not using the site.
That's not a bad idea. There's also del.icio.us bookmarks and things like that which could be counted (Newsgator too). We'll see how it goes like this at first, then think about adding in extra ways of tracking attention.
Does it deliberately conflict with the amazingly popular Scintilla (http://www.scintilla.org/) ?
Not deliberately, no. It's a shame about the name clash, but people preferred this name over any of the alternatives we could come up with.
Looks a whole lot like SciLink's suggestion engine... http://www.scilink.com
It's a simple Slope One recommender algorithm at the moment:
http://drupal.org/project/cre
I don't know if that's what SciLink uses.
Sounds really interesting, but there seem to be some serious performance issues? I think I managed to get the page to load once and the css never even came through, so no nice drupal theme.
Hope you manage to get it to tick.
Cheers,
Kehan
Kehan: Performance is fine, but there's a problem with a dodgy firewall in front of Scintilla's server. It's hopefully going to be fixed some time in August. Until then, if you can get to the site from somewhere else, there's a workaround for Linux in the FAQ: http://scintilla.nature.com/faq